


my wildest wind, come make me smile again

by elektra



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Extramarital Affairs, F/M, Introspection, Pining, Red Plague (The Arcana), Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24496696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra
Summary: “There are ghosts of many Countesses in the halls,” Asra says, matter-of-factly. “Can’t you feel them?”Nadia skews an eyebrow up at him. “That’s silly.”But she can. Now that he’s said it, put it into words, that is what she’s felt all this time; that nothing is truly hers.
Relationships: Julian Devorak/Nadia, Lucio/Nadia (The Arcana)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i began writing this in january 2018 when many plot points and character relationships were still unknown and so this work incorporates some theories from that time and my own canon divergent plot which does not rely on the apprentice or many magic-related shenanigans.

The only time Nadia has ever knelt for anyone or anything in her life was to pray.

She didn’t do it often to begin with.

She prayed once, as a child, for a dog to keep her company.

The second time, for her eldest sister to contract the common pox when she pushed Nadia into a patch of mud and pretended not to notice.

The third and final time, Nadia spared the last few minutes of privacy to crouch at her bedside, her forehead cradled in the folds of her elbows, and she prayed that Count Lucio would be a nicer man than rumours foretold and her folly ignored.

Given how rash and indecent each request had been, it’s surprising that she wasn’t smote by a bolt of lightning, or something of equal divinity.

Count Lucio fulfills her prayers in twisted ways, as is his wont.

He gives Nadia two hounds, who guard against company instead.

He gives her clean clothing that need never touch mud, much less a mite of dust, but he spreads disease over his conquests like a septic flag, and the peoples’ skin blisters in the earliest throes of it.

He gives her everything, really. Some people would mistake it for kindness, or consider it well and good enough that a man borne of violence knows how to differentiate his marriage bed from a battlefield. But Nadia can see nothing behind his steely eyes when he does it. Lucio looks at her like he looks at a statue in the garden: beautiful, but posed that way.

Count Lucio had the potential for love. It’s wrapped up beneath something dark and painful to the touch, but sometimes his hand was open and mild when he placed it on the small of Nadia’s back to weave her between crowds at dinner parties. Sometimes his laugh was not hollow, because he once had the patience for discussion — not talking _at_ someone — and humour. Sometimes he leaned in as if he wanted to kiss her, like no one else had dared do before.

But nice men, Nadia thought, were as fleeting as a prayer. She wonders instead what it would take for a nice man to morph into just a man.

They all had it within themselves, after all: a god, a count, a shepherd. All of their hearts weighed the same in the end, and always heavier than a feather.

* * *

A summer garden party, that only just begins at an hour Nadia usually expects to be asleep by. She watches the sun slip past the sloping horizon of the city, and the humid breeze brings on it a snowstorm of cottonwood seeds. The open palace grounds have replaced milling staff with the invited retinue of Council members and varying titles. From the balcony, Nadia can see the circle formed in congregation around Count Lucio. The eye of the storm.

Nadia slips down the broad staircase and back into the crowd before she is too greatly or obviously missed. Powdering her nose should take only so long. Her hand immediately drifts to pluck a flute of champagne from a passing tray when she sees the Count approaching, his eyes shimmering.

Lucio clinks his glass of something dark and fragrant against hers. “You missed the best part of the story,” he says.

“I did, didn’t I.” Nadia doesn’t need to ask for him to tell her about it.

“The Aeppian Campaign, of course,” his lean posture puffs up even in mention of it. His knuckles skim admiringly down the gold trim of her dress, collarbone to waist. “It never fails to leave an audience in stitches.”

Burning a town centre and boasting its ashen flag on the rump of one’s horse does elicit some form of weeping, certainly.

“Pardon me,” someone interrupts, parting a crowd of courtiers behind Lucio.

Lucio half-turns to the source, sweeping an arm out to the side with great welcoming bravado, and a squirmy, pale man steps forward into the invitation.

“I present myself as Praetor Vlastomil,” the man bows slightly at the waist.

Lucio seems to hardly notice. Instead, his line of sight is tracked to and held by a large red gemstone festooned in the centre of the Praetor’s chest. “Lovely gemstone,” he says, grinning.

Some of the faces of the courtiers morph into disgust. They are all attracted to luxury, but Lucio’s overt gluttony for it makes even the most gilded stomach turn. Stories and precious metals — that’s all the substance the Count has. Nadia sympathizes, but she can only do so much to quell their impatience.

“Oh,” Vlastomil scrambles, trying to look down at himself and better display the stone. “My gratitude, Count Lucio, I am so very proud of pioneering the process of creating them…”

“What, alchemy?”

“No, oh, no, pure science. Practically identical to a natural rubies but without the intensive labour necessary to mine… I wish not to disclose the particulars of my technique but it is administered to a… ah… special ingredient.”

“You would not even tell your own Count? Who else could you trust more?”

“Well, myself and only myself…”

“Surely you can disclose this special ingredient at the very least.”

The Praetor’s eyes sparkle, and his veiny, sallow lips peel apart in glee. “Beetles,” he breathes reverently. “The most beautiful red beetles one will ever lay their eyes on.”

Nadia can’t help curling the corner of her lip at that. The more she looks into the gemstone, unable to take her eyes off how the light refracts into its sharp edges, the more she sees skittering bugs in its cut.

Lucio leans away as if he only just noticed how captivated he’d been with the Praetor’s adornments. “I wasn’t expecting that to be the case. I suppose there can be found a use for any crawling thing of the earth.”

Vastomil caresses the gemstone absentmindedly. “I value my beetles like a hunter values his pack of hounds… I am their only master after all.”

Lucio laughs, somewhat mockingly. “I’ll put in an order.”

The Praetor’s eyes widen. “What do you mean, My Lord?”

“I want my own beetle rubies. My personal coffers are nearly endless; I’ve already obtained everything of even meagre beauty between Vesuvia and the northern ocean.” Lucio braces a hand on his hip, staring down at the crooked-statured old man. “I will wait for you in the treasury office after refreshments are served.”

The Praetor bows respectfully and backs away, but the crowd of courtiers has long dispersed.

Lucio pouts at Nadia. “It looks like it’s just you and me now, darling.”

Nadia tilts her head back to finish her glass of champagne and leaves it on the edge of a fountain. “No, it’s just you, dearest,” she says as she walks away from him.

* * *

It’s horrific. Tacky. Juvenile.

The gold is polished to such totality that it sparkles and gleams even in shadow. If the beetle ruby had been cut to a finer shape, it may have been the best part, but it’s garishly styled and flanked by two incisors.

“The tusk tips from a boar I hunted for just this occasion,” Lucio explains, watching her eyes trail over the whitened bone. He is kneeling in front of her, both hands framing the outside of her thighs. His thumbs massage circles into her skin, but his touch is cold even in the sweltering heat that breaks past the canopy of bushes on her balcony.

Nadia offers him nothing in return besides a clipped, “thank you,” and strokes her rubied hand through his hair after Lucio slobbers a kiss on the back of it.

Unexpectedly, he doesn’t leave. He throws himself down into the seat on the other side of an intricately carved, round stone table.

He asks, “what are you doing?”

“I’m…” She picks back up a strip of pale pink fabric and a sewing needle bound with purple thread. “I’m making a shawl. It’s a traditional piece for a festival in Prakra next week.”

Lucio hums. “Are you going?”

Nadia’s forehead furrows. “No.”

“I wouldn’t stop you. There’s no chain around your ankle.”

“I know there isn’t.” Nadia hadn’t even considered the fact that she could go home. She still doesn’t. There’s no need for some grand production of a reunion — as if anyone misses her that much. “I don’t see any need to go. It’s not special.”

“Then why are you making that?”

“Habit.”

“Ah,” Lucio sounds understanding. “Habit is the worst habit of humanity. To do things without thinking of why we do them.”

Nadia adjusts the fabric across her lap to continue a curly filigree pattern. “You’re a very funny man if you’re trying to tell me you evaluate everything you do in a day.”

“Why is that difficult to believe?”

Nadia pauses to glare at him.

Lucio smirks as he stands to finally leave. “Everything has a reason — and not all of my reasons are as perverse or selfish as you think they are."

That ring keeps her awake that night. She stares at each facet of the gemstone, twisting it and worrying it between her fingers, and she finds that she simply cannot reason why Lucio would gift it to her first. With how he near salivated over the allure of the ruby on Vlastomil’s tunic, it would not be uncharacteristic for him to, only after being garnished head-to-toe in gleaming red, remember Nadia and ask if she would like some as well.

Lucio was not mean-spirited towards Nadia. That was something he could master some control over – his selfishness was another story altogether. He has some tact regarding the carefully measured wire strung between the two of them. But it has no depreciation. Leaving it alone, she thinks, would be the most favourable course of action. They allow each other a sentence of witty repartee and a friendly touch in public company for the sake of appearances.

None of that requires rings.

Nadia tosses her head back onto her pillow. She’s thought too much about something that means no more to Lucio than a declaration of ownership. He wants his pretty things to be even prettier. She yanks the ring off and drops it into a tray on her bedside table.

The band itches, anyways. Cheap gold. Fit for a statue.

* * *

The young servant girl assigned to Nadia’s employ lights up and says she knows a good doctor when the Count first complains of feeling ill. Portia chirps happily about how, luckily, he’s just returned to Vesuvia as she sets out the next meal’s plates.

“A little flu is something the court doctor can’t see to?” Nadia sends Lucio a sharp look over the rim of her wine glass, across the dinner table. The servant girl shrinks away, but it’s nothing to do with her.

“ _Pfah,_ ” Lucio sneers into his remaining scallops. “That fogey. Last winter he tried to give me a fortifying powder to mix with drink, I asked that damn fool what was in it, he said _crushed mummy tissue._ Get a real doctor in here.”

“What’s even the matter? You can’t possibly be so ill to require pulling a stranger out of nowhere to examine you if you scheduled a lion hunt.”

“My head, my head!” Lucio laments. “Even chewing is too loud in my head!”

“Your appetite has been less.”

“It has! Oh, Nadia, my attentive beauty!”

She sneers. “But a headache is nothing to throw a fit over.”

“Not just! I have these terrible chills but terrible sweats! The aches, Nadia, the aches keep me awake. Do you know how difficult it is to go through days as taxing as mine without any sleep?”

“And what exactly burdens you so much, dear Count?” Nadia exchanges the handkerchief in her lap for a fresh one with Portia.

“That bastard Vlastomil! He was happy to take my money for the rubies, but now Vesuvian crimson has taken hold of the zeitgeist! Everyone wants it, and he’s trying to give me the slip on more beetles.”

“How many rubies can one person have?”

“Not just rubies, Nadia — they make an excellent dye. I’ve just commissioned a full set of riding gear in Vesuvian crimson. I should fashion you a matching set,” Lucio says haughtily. He’s so very proud of himself.

“Red does me no favours,” and Nadia leaves it at that. It may just be her imagination, but the ruby ring Lucio gave her lingers with a strange scent that invokes the same nausea as company with Vlastomil does.

So Doctor Devorak is summoned the next day to the solarium where Lucio breaks for lunch.

It’s beneath the aviary. The macaws are shrieking above the glass roof and Nadia’s temples are pounding as she lingers by the credenza.

Doctor Devorak withdraws his fingers from the underside of Lucio’s jaw just as the Count has become irritated and tries to swat him away. He wipes his gloves on a dampened cloth.

“I recognize you from somewhere,” Lucio insists, as he has been ever since Doctor Devorak stepped through the door. “I’ve been to Nevivon many times.”

“And I’ve not been in Nevivon for a very long time,” Doctor Devorak evidently decides to humour Lucio as he rifles through a deep leather bag. “Though I ensure that my looks are very typical to the area, perhaps Your Lordship is merely mistaken.”

“No,” Lucio hums, but he pulls his teeth out of the matter.

Nadia is growing restless playing her part of the concerned wife. She shifts her weight from foot to foot in a way that she hopes is subtle, and that conveys agitation rather than boredom. At this pace, she’ll be late to an appointment for tea with a miserable, but delightfully gossip-mongering dowager.

“For now your symptoms are quite mild, My Lord,” but Doctor Devorak is looking up at Nadia instead as he speaks. He doesn’t know that he need not assuage her. “I suspect it’ll worsen to some degree before your usual health returns, but it should be only a passing, rather typical fever. Feel no hesitation in sending for me should My Lordship not recover fully within the next two weeks.”

Lucio scoffs his thanks and farewell.

Nadia follows the doctor out and spares no glance to the Count, who is buttoning his blouse up.

“My Lady,” Doctor Devorak stops her outside the door, and holds out a vial filled with a viscous amber liquid. “For the Count’s hoarse throat. Twice a day, as needed.”

Nadia doesn’t take it, nor does she do a good job of smoothing her curled lip. “A servant would be more keen with that.”

Doctor Devorak’s expression flutters.

Nadia has time neither for his hesitation nor his speculations on the status of her marriage, so she sighs out through her nose and snatches the sticky vial from him. She sets it in the cabinet beneath her washing basin and promptly forgets about it.

* * *

Doctor Devorak is called for at the crack of dawn when the Count wakes coughing up bloody spittle.

“Has he been given the mixture I gave you during the last appointment?” The Doctor rinses off his soapy hands in a deep bowl of water.

Nadia feels herself go hot, only now remembering the abandoned vial sitting incriminatingly in her room. “Yes.”

“Hm,” Doctor Devorak nods. “It must have progressed quickly. I detected an infection in his lungs and I’ve already told his caretakers to make sure they give him the medication. It’s a powerful tincture that will keep him asleep for most of the day, but he should recover by the end of the month.”

The doctor would be of exceptional height, if his stature was not slumped and Nadia was not also taller than most. He has a swath of red hair that would be a cloud of tight curls if it wasn’t oiled back.

Nadia comments on such: “You’re quite a young doctor.”

“Ah,” Doctor Devorak nervously wrings a towel between his hands. “The mind is sharpest in one’s youth, no? If My Lady is concerned about the quality of my work, it was with great kindness and trust I was called upon, and so I may, of course, provide a referral of very happy and very alive former patients —“

Nadia lifts a hand to cut him off. She may be doing him a favour; he seems like he’s about to run out of air. “That isn’t necessary. I was only remarking. I recognize I was short with you the last time we met.”

Doctor Devorak’s shoulders slump into something approaches comfort. “Illness adds a great deal of stress onto even the healthy. I don’t fault you for it.“

Nadia arches an eyebrow at him.

His mouth gapes open and closed like a fish before he starts again, “I mean to say, when those we care about —“

“Don’t hurt yourself now,” Nadia goads, but the corners of her lips betray a smirk. It gets him to snap his jaw shut. “It’s still early in the day. You’ll have some lunch before going on your way.”

“My Lady, while I am grateful for the invitation, my appetite is…”

“I didn’t invite you, Doctor, I instructed you.”

“Try this,” Nadia breaks off the end of a flatbread, the airy dough erupting in a plume of steam, and hands it to Doctor Devorak. “With the eggplant here.”

He dips it into the thick, bright orange sauce and chews solemnly.

“You don’t like it?”

He gulps. “It’s very flavourful.”

“You’re sweating, Doctor.”

“As I said,” he takes a long drink from a cup of pomegranate juice, which stains his lips red. “Flavourful.”

Nadia offers a high-arched brow. “I suppose it takes a certain amount of heartiness and worldliness to appreciate my homeland’s cuisine.”

“No doubt, My Lady. You continue to impress.”

Nadia narrows her eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

The tips of the Doctor’s ears and nose turn pink, even though he has yet to eat any more curry. “I’m only paying you a well-deserved compliment, My Lady. There is no other meaning."

Nadia places a stuffed grape leaf onto her plate, fiddling with the vine keeping it closed. “If you hadn’t already noticed, the Count’s disposition worsens.”

Doctor Devorak chuckles a little, but like he’s regarding something pitifully. “He wouldn’t allow me to administer his medicine until I hung his new red curtains.”

“I apologize, Doctor.” It’s Nadia’s turn to flush. “That is… deeply humiliating for a man of your caliber.”

He shrugs. “There’s nothing prestigious about being me. You don’t know the kinds of humiliating things I’ve had to do during my career.”

“Even so,” she passes him a small silver bowl of cold shredded vegetables. “It’s no way for a Count to act. He often swings from obsession to obsession — last year it was horse husbandry — but I’ve never seen him go after anything with this kind of ferocity as he does these red beetles.”

“Red beetles?”

Nadia braces an elbow on the table and massages her temple. Even thinking about it this far has her head twinging. “A Praetor uses red beetle dye to obtain that illustrious Vesuvian crimson.” She rolls her eyes. “Most curious of all, he has some confidential method of making them into ruby gemstones.”

“Now I think I’ve heard everything,” Doctor Devorak mumbles.

"The Praetor and him have been in some disputes. Lucio’s desire for ever-more beetles is one thing, but now Vesuvian crimson has come into fashion around the city. I suspect the Praetor is none too happy that his creation has gotten out of his hands.” Nadia smiles, for only a second. “I’ve heard of fevers that cause delirium. Do you think the Count’s illness has amplified his obsession?”

“You must be very well read, My Lady,” the Doctor comments. “It’s certainly possible. I’ll keep it in mind — and I’ll have to ask around the city about these red beetles. I do like a pop of colour.”

Nadia shakes her head. “Blue is more suitable for your complexion.”

“Oh,” he’s back to being flustered. “I value your expert opinion.”

When they finish eating, the Doctor slings his waistcoat over his arm and gathers his bag of equipment. “Thank you for lunch,” he says. “Do pray that the Count’s illness is as routine as I believe it is.”

“Don’t pray, Doctor Devorak,” Nadia replies sullenly, “Just do.”


	2. Chapter 2

The catacombs are more morbid than the usual bright flavours Vesuvia has to offer.

Nadia has to wonder what could possibly warrant meeting Doctor Devorak in the depths of the city. She creaks open the heavy gate nestled in an overgrown rock face just outside the palace grounds and descends down into the pink sandstone maze. The most ancient of tombs are at the beginning, when the catacombs had just begun to be carved out. Statues and memorials of founding rulers are respectfully decorated with flower wreaths and fresh fruit has been laid down at their feet. But now the sheer size of the city and its underground necessitates its use for common people of all sort.

The deeper Nadia wanders, the darker it becomes. She takes and lights a hanging metal lantern, following the winding staircase down until the catacombs open into a larger room lined with alcoves, not all yet filled with tombs.

Doctor Devorak, an assistant palace doctor, two gravediggers, and five bodies lying beneath white sheets on the ground are there.

“My Lady,” the Doctor greets her. He looks baseline nervous. Doesn’t like to be surrounded by the dead? “I’m sorry to have brought you here. Quaestor Valdemar advised that you should be the first to know.”

Nadia raises an eyebrow. “You work for Quaestor Valdemar now?”

“I happened to be in the room…"

“Errand boy,” Nadia teases. The Doctor sputters a little until his attention is brought back to the covered bodies when she gestures at them. “What’s this, then?

“Five deceased men with the same suspicious ailments. They were brought last night.” Doctor Devorak lifts the shroud from one’s feet. His stiff, mottled legs are covered in thick, raised, bright red veins. Then the Doctor reveals the man’s face: blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and the whites of his eyes so bloodshot they are nothing but red.

Nadia raises her hand to her mouth. “A plague?”

“Maybe,” Doctor Devorak covers the dead man again. “All five worked and lived in close proximity to one another in the production sector.”

“What do you recommend we do?”

“I have little experience in these types of outbreaks. Quaestor Valdemar would like to begin canvassing their neighbourhoods and closing buildings where the deceased spent the most time. I would also add that we should be making note of who has similar symptoms — the red eyes and bloody cough would be the most obvious — and quarantining them as well. Even if we can’t be sure they passed it along to each other, much less if it can be passed on or if it was more like a common poisoning…”

“It would be the most prudent course of action.” Nadia nods. “Draft the notice and I will sign it.”

Doctor Devorak accompanies Nadia out of the catacombs while the assistant doctor instructs the gravediggers on how to wrap the bodies.

“A doctor who doesn’t like the dead,” she remarks around the corner.

He laughs nervously. “I would argue all doctors should hate the dead if their work is to ensure the living keep on living. No, I don’t like the feeling of it all. I’ve never seen an illness of this nature — and while I enjoy the mystery my work involves, I sense something foul afoot.”

“Mysteries are only enjoyable if you think solving them will be rewarding,” Nadia is breathing a bit heavier by the time they climb enough stairs to see sunlight slowly overtaking the lantern. “We’re both suspicious of the journey ahead.”

Doctor Devorak takes the lantern from her and hangs it back on an empty hook, catching up to her outside of the catacomb gates. “My Lady, a journey with you becomes as burdensome as a walk in the garden,” he beams at her.

She smooths out a frown before it can catch on her lips, and she questions why that is the first reaction that manifested while her heart fluttered. “I’m not sure about that,” she says quietly.

While they embark on said walk through the rosebushes back into the palace, a voice from above breaks the silence.

“There you are!” Lucio is leaning on the aviary's balcony. “I’ve been looking for the Doctor all morning! I feel _fantastic!”_

“You certainly… look fantastic, My Lord!” Doctor Devorak shouts back up at him. “Please, don’t exert yourself! I will be up shortly!”

Nadia sighs. “Go on, Doctor. I will meet you there to witness this miraculous recovery.”

He rushes on ahead to gather his equipment, and she takes a numbers puzzle-book from her room to entertain herself with.

“Shit,” Lucio curses violently while Doctor Devorak is halfway through his check-up ritual. The doctor’s hand slips with the expletive, losing the rhythm of the air gauge.

“Darling,” Nadia begins to scold, but finds she has nothing to say beyond the cursory habit. She idly toys with a dessert fork in Lucio’s forgotten dish of mango, not looking up from her book.

“ _Ilya,_ ” Lucio hisses accusingly at Doctor Devorak, who somehow moults into even further of a grief-stricken pallor. “That’s where I know you from! Ilya!”

“Oh, dear,” the Doctor’s complexion down to the hollow of his throat goes pink. He squeezes down one more time on a leather pouch before unstrapping the cuff from Lucio’s upper arm. “I was hoping I had put you into enough of a delirium that you wouldn’t recognize me.”

A mocking laugh. “As if any of your quack remedies could put me out for good!”

“Please, by all means, do continue to ignore my unenlightened presence,” Nadia mutters, but loud enough to interject Lucio’s feisty wriggling in his chair.

“He’s the charlatan who cut my arm off!” Lucio shouts, ruffling a charm of honeycreepers in the overhanging gardenia.

Doctor Devorak attempts to placate, “Now, now —"

Nadia flattens her book down on the table and laughs. She can hardly help the abrupt, ugly sound — even less in stopping it. Her stomach quivers as she leans back in her chair, partially covering her face with one palm, and she laughs.

It’s only because she imagined Doctor Devorak brandishing the severed limb like a primeval man might a club, whilst Lucio whimpers in that way he does, only then half-lucid and undone. Were it her, Nadia would have lodged the man’s own elbow into his skull and delivered him all the way to the grave.

The doctor is hanging his head low, but through the fallen tangle of his hair Nadia can see his shy grin and flushed cheeks.

“Your story,” Nadia politely wipes the corners of her eyes with the kerchief spread on her lap, dissipating the final throes of her amusement. “Your recounting does a great disservice to Doctor Devorak in its portrayal of him.”

Lucio, looking thoroughly humiliated, launches himself out of his seat, sending it shrieking behind him across the stone terrace. “How so!?” He performs a decadent, meaningless flurry of hand gestures to emphasize, “It’s all true what he did! It speaks to the character of a man who would rather chop limbs off than try harder at his job!”

And the Count leaves with his cup of watered-wine, dabbing at his upper lip with a red handkerchief.

“Says the man who made limb-chopping his sole venture in life.” Nadia’s tone is drier than her favourite pinot.

Doctor Devorak packs his equipment in silence.

When he’s done, he turns to address Nadia. She’s already stood to see him off, slipping her hand through the loop of his arm while he opens and closes his mouth wordlessly at her. The sheer perfumed curtains snag on their shoulders as she leads him over the threshold and to the main hall of the wing.

“Heed the Count’s tirades with a block of salt, Doctor,” Nadia says. “Even in health, he hardly knows how to keep his head from spinning with all of his tales.”

“Ah,” the Doctor shrugs. “If I’m being honest, it all goes in one ear and out the other.”

Nadia looks longwise at him.

“I mean…“ his tongue stumbles like it’s suddenly that much heavier, and all the blood rushes simultaneously to and from his face. It’s a remarkable skill. “I don’t… I greatly respect—"

She smiles. “Dear Doctor, you could dangle me above a ravine and I would be hard-pressed to tell you what Lucio had said not a minute before.”

He slumps in relief, braving a laugh as he shakes his head.

“We can reacquaint ourselves,” Nadia offers when they face each other to part at the courtyard gates. “Ilya.”

“My Lady,” he says cautiously.

“Nadia, please.”

“I would prefer—"

“If you force my hand, Ilya, my signet ring carries the power of decree,” she teases.

“You don’t think it would cause any trouble, if I addressed you so informally?”

Nadia crosses her arms. “Is anyone giving you trouble?”

“No, no, no!”

“Good. How I want my Court Doctor to address me is my business. I will see you tomorrow, Ilya.”

The Doctor sighs acceptingly and has one hand on the gate latch before he sputters, his heels squeaking on the marble floor with how fast he turns around. “Court Doctor!? I can’t accept a promotion of this nature!”

Nadia is already walking away and does not turn to him lest she reveal her wide grin. She waves dismissively over her shoulder. “No acceptance required, Court Doctor Devorak.”

* * *

Nadia wants to blame the heat of her morning bath for how profusely she’s sweating, but her intuition has been nagging her since last night that she is falling ill. She clears her raspy throat as quietly as she can with Portia organizing linens on the other side of the papyrus screen. Wiping her brow with her towel as she dries herself off does helps only until the next dizzying wave of heat comes upon her.

But days are for braving, so she slips into her silk dressing robe and seats herself on her plush vanity bench. Portia dutifully combs out her damp hair and begins braiding it, humming to herself as she goes along.

When she’s done, Portia reaches for a new hair clip set out on the vanity counter. A gift from Lucio, covered in clusters of beetle rubies.

“No,” Nadia says quickly before Portia can even touch it. She’s not entirely sure why, but the very sight of it sends a crawling chill up her spine. “Not that one. The pearl band keeps it together better."

Portia cheerfully ties the pink pearls around the bottom of her braided hair instead. “As you wish! I only thought it’d make Lucio happy to see you wear his gifts.”

Nadia scoffs.

“But when was the last time we cared about that, huh?” Portia winks at her in the mirror.

“Watch yourself,” Nadia scolds her playfully. “I’ll lock you in stocks and throw rotten tomatoes at you.”

She leaves Nadia to finish putting on her jewellery and dresses the bed with a pile of decorative pillows. Nadia stares at the spread of her various trinkets but can’t seem to make herself choose anything. Her arms feel weak and heavy at the same time.

“Portia,” she says as she slowly gets up, conceding defeat and feeling like she’s floating back into her bed. Portia wears a look of concern and quickly holds back the top sheets to let her back in. “Would you please fetch Doctor Devorak?”

“Are you unwell, My Lady?”

“A bit under the weather.”

“I’ll get him at once!” Portia helps her recline by placing perfectly fluffed pillows to support her back. “What do you… think of him?”

Nadia’s head swims, and not just because of the pulsing heat that grips it in a vice. “I trust him,” she mumbles and slips away into a light sleep.

“My Lady?”

Nadia jolts awake. She groans a bit at the discomfort of waking still sitting up, stretching her arms out. “Ilya,” she wets her dry mouth with his name. He is crouching at her bedside. “You… you’re wearing your hair differently.”

The Doctor looks rather embarrassed as he runs a hand through his tousled curls, usually barely held back with oil. “I must look like a deranged squirrel, no? I apologize for my appearance, I had a long night and your maid had to peel my face off my desk, so I came as I was… “

“It’s better that way,” Nadia closes her eyes to block against the brightness of her room.

“My Lady, you will make me the most fashionable man in Vesuvia if you keep divulging your beauty secrets to me.” His thumbs are gentle and warm as they feel around her jaw. He asks, “congestion?”

Nadia sniffles affirmatively and sinks lower into her nest of pillows.

Ilya gives her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Just rest. You’ll feel better soon.”

She wakes up again sometime during the early evening with the sweet smell of summer dusk floating through her curtains, her head still foggy but her body stronger. Reaching for a glass of lukewarm water set on her bedside table, she notices what looks like a small ceramic teapot. A note lays under it: _For your congestion. — Doctor Devorak._ His handwriting is scraggly and hesitant, as though he was concentrating very hard to shape each letter legibly.

On the fourth day of her solitude, Nadia’s stomach growls for nearly an hour straight, and she decides there’s been enough wallowing in bed. Her legs are wobbly from disuse, but the lingering feeling of her sickbed is washed away by the unravelling day around her.

By lunchtime, she’s reached the most recent document left on her desk last night: a very brief note from Quaestor Valdemar urging her to visit the library. An update on the deceased from the catacombs, hopefully. She is even more hopeful that it turned out to be nothing significant.

Why the library and not the workshop, Nadia isn’t sure. The workshop is markedly different from the Quaestor’s laboratory, the latter of which not even Nadia is permitted to enter. Not that she wants to spoil any good sentiment she has towards her palace by knowing what lurks beneath it. Nonetheless, Nadia unlocks the stalwart library doors without any chance to admire the rows of fragrant apple trees and lilac blushes blooming around it. It’s empty inside. Everyone must have gone for lunch.

She is sure it didn’t look like as much of a disaster when she was last inside. Maps of the city scrawled with writing hang over the shelves. Many bookcases have been completely emptied of their contents. The reading desks have all been pushed together into clusters of four or five, some covered with medical instruments and others with books but all to such an extent she can’t tell what kind of wood the desk is made of anymore.

One of the desks has Doctor Devorak’s black coat slung over it. Nadia approaches it like it might explode at any moment, the tips of her fingers itching as she inspects what he has spread over it. Well, she’s already snooped with her eyes, so she may as well go the full mile. She folds his coat onto a chair instead and leafs over some loose documents. Most of it she can’t even decipher, but a few have crude technical drawings of leeches and chemical equations.

She narrows her eyes when she opens the front cover of a book concisely titled ‘Plagues’ and sees a folded notepaper with what appears to have her name on it. If it’s addressed to her, it’s considered hers and she can’t be faulted for looking, now can she?

It’s a regretful decision.

Doctor Devorak has tried his hand at writing poetry… about her.

The usual trite: her eyes are more splendid than any ruby, her skin is softer than all the beautiful silk she might ever own, her hair is like the sparkle of a perfectly ripened bundle of grapes (not an uncommon simile, surprisingly). She has to put it down for a moment and blink through her embarrassment for him. But there’s a yearning honestly to it, and a shakiness in his handwriting that makes it worth more than a sonneteer’s practiced charm.

Still, this is not something that should have been pursued.

“Doctor, what in the world are you thinking…” Nadia mutters to herself as she places the paper back into the book and drops it back on his desk like it burns her hands.

For a moment, she thinks she’s seeing ghosts when she looks up and Ilya is walking through the library doors.

“Oh,” he smiles at her. Something inside her feels like gears creaking together uncomfortably. “You’ve found our little command centre.”

“Command centre?” She gestures at his messy desk. “It looks more like a battlefield.”

“Well, what do you think we’re commanding?” Ilya sets a cup of coffee atop a precarious pile of nondescript wooden boxes.

“Quaestor Valdemar told me to come.”

“I can brief you,” he collects a stuffed folder. “But maybe somewhere more private. Everyone else will return from lunch soon and you could barely hear a pin drop over how hard they’re all concentrating."

Nadia wants to decline, but there’s some moral hazard regarding her knowledge of _why_ privacy would be inappropriate. “My room, then,” she concedes.

“Something to drink?” Nadia offers when they enter her room. She strategically guides him to the small office attachment instead of the more comfortable settee.

Ilya raises his cup of coffee, “this is all I need.” So, she shrugs and pours herself a sparkling pear juice.

“To your health,” he toasts with a clink.

She corrects him, “to the health of Vesuvia.”

“Speaking of which. The plague,” Doctor Devorak says, “it’s… well. I regret to inform you that what we witnessed in the catacombs certainly _is_ indeed a plague. We’ve tracked it as spreading out from the docks and production sector, as we first believed. By the time we were able to establish any quarantine, the affected area had already multiplied in size.”

Nadia feels a nervous sweat gather at her hairline. “Who oversees our response now?”

“The courtiers gave unanimous approval for Quaestor Valdemar’s directives, as required in your absence. For the first day. Then the prospect of mass blight threw them into a panic, and many have fled the city.”

She crunches her hands into fists. “Spineless cowards. I will bring them to task if they dare step outside their gaudy cottages again.”

Ilya stares forlornly into his coffee. “The Quaestor has every doctor of repute working day and night on both tracking the plague and finding a cure. I fear only one of these endeavours is worthwhile. It’s appeared nearly everywhere in the city now.”

“Four days,” Nadia flexes her tense jaw. “It took four days. I should have been disturbed from my rest.”

“Would you personally have saved them all, My Lady?” He shakes his head to dismiss the idea. “That task is mine. We’ve done what we’ve needed to do. There’s nothing left but to… think.”

“How… how dangerous is it?”

“There are not very many deaths yet as it takes some time to kill, but… it would truly be an awful end for even the most deserving. It feeds off the body like a wasting disease until the patient is emaciated and weak. Vomiting, with blood in the later stages. Eyes so swollen and bloodshot they become entirely red. Every fluid is potentially contagious, perhaps even skin or breath.”

“Be careful, Doctor, when you study this.”

He smiles up at her through the hair swept over his face. “I will.”

Nadia notices how Ilya’s gaze had been repeatedly, skittishly drawn to the neti pot placed on a cupboard behind her.

"It was a truly thoughtful gift," she offers gently, looking over her shoulder at the stout little pot. "I've made a full recovery."

"Oh, isn't that good news. I was — ehm. Concerned. It isn't a thing of luxury."

“No, I suppose it isn’t.” Nadia slowly uncrosses her legs and gets up from her chair, her silky clothing the loudest thing next to his churning mind and the nervous bob of his throat. But his face is not nearly as flushed as it might have been. He's getting better. It makes Nadia proud in such a strange way that it simply must be smothered.

"Yet it would be far less functional were it encrusted with gems and plated with silver," Nadia says when she’s in front of him.

Ilya near wheezes, "You're teasing me again.”

“Bravo,” she drawls.

“I should go. The other doctors in the library must have returned by now.”

Ilya stands up, but she doesn’t back away. They face each other with not a foot of distance between themselves. Nadia’s heartbeat is like the ticking second hand of a clock that can be heard from the level beneath it.

“Ilya,” she starts.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.” Nadia steps aside. Ilya deflates into the space she leaves. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

Guilt flashes across her conscience. Not because of how his countenance fell when he was dismissed, but because it’s been nearly a week since she saw her own husband, and instead she gallivants with a doctor, an employee of hers. She sits and lounges with him in the hopes that everything else will simply fade away and no longer be a responsibility.

But she has a responsibility to maintain stability and order. The city needs her, lest Lucio is confronted with too many choices to be made and default to a draconian order wherein he throws the first stone at a crowd. She is the level-headed one, not meant to be distracted by any flight or fancy — the morals of marital loyalty are lost on both her and Lucio, but the rationality of an affair isn’t evident to her.

Assuming there is an affair to be had. There’s no reason anyone should want her; she makes sure of it.

Even though Lucio would do nothing but annoy her, it would give Nadia the smallest bit of relief from her guilt to visit him. Though she feels well of body, something nags at her to check the colour of her eyes in the mirror before she goes. Her sclera are still white as ever.

“Lucio,” she musters her most lighthearted voice as she cracks open his door slowly. His room inside is darker than she remembered it, and her vision takes several seconds to adjust.

Across from the entrance, the Count is on all fours on top of a servant and he is choking the life out of the young girl trapped awkwardly between the floor and the bed. Her fingers are clawing futilely at his powerful hands and her legs are kicking up the rug beneath her. His foamy spittle globs onto her teary, blue face.

“Lucio!” Nadia charges him, trying to push him away with the strength of her shoulder, scoring his arms and hands with her nails in hopes the pain would make him recoil. “Lucio, Lucio, stop it! Get off her!”

It’s only when Nadia’s elbow slams into his ribs that Lucio topples over. She shoves the servant as far away as she can, putting herself between the girl and the Count. He looks like a scraggly bag of bones with his cream sleeping shirt hanging off his thinned shoulders, his hair grown long over his hollow face. And his eyes are bright red, piercing her soul.

Nadia stumbles back. She looks at the room, and it is all red.

She runs out.

Another servant must have been bringing him fresh washing water and abandoned the cart in the hallway to see to the commotion. Nadia frantically rips away her suit top, blouse, and neck scarf down to her base camisole, scrubbing and scrubbing at any exposed skin until it hurts. Lucio is shouting at the entourage of care staff that have flocked to his side, but it’s barely audible over the blood rushing in her ears. Nadia braces her arms on the edge of the basin and sinks her head low, catching her breath. She is startled when something heavy thumps against the wall above her, and she jumps back into Doctor Devorak.

“My Lady,” he starts, gripping her shoulder in a way that may have otherwise been comforting.

She jerks away from him. “Don’t touch me!”

He freezes, his hands hovering, unsure. “Are you alright? What happened?”

“The Count,” Nadia points viciously to Lucio’s bedroom, her chest heaving, “has lost his mind to the plague!”

“I know —"

“You know? You _know?_ Then get in there and _do your job!”_


	3. Chapter 3

Nadia doesn’t like last resorts. She doesn’t like feeling as if everyone else has played their last card and now she has to pick up the whole deck.

But plague-infected citizens of Vesuvia have been wailing for reprieve at the locked gates of the palace for the past week, and she has had to watch them wither and die where they stand for just as long. Their faces flash across her mind when she closes her eyes, and their skeletal bodies linger in the darkest corners of her bedroom when she tosses through the night.

They aren’t the only spectres of the night. Lucio screams through nearly the entirety of it. Sometimes words, though often nonsensical or increasingly absurd demands, and other times only yowling befit of an animal more than a man. The screaming is punctuated by the skittering of bugs in the walls, but Nadia has not yet been driven to such a point of madness where she would start peeling away at the plaster to see if this is real or her imagination.

Doctor Devorak has been making himself scarce, for one reason or another, but he left a report of attempted (and failed) cures on her desk this morning: an entire list of things done with a poisonous snake, various mixtures of ground up and whole minerals in all sorts of foods and drinks, a rather desperate attempt to open all the red stained glass windows now occupying the Count’s room in hopes of releasing a miasma, and leeches. Many, many leeches.

Nadia had enough. She could not be another disappointment to the people of Vesuvia. She could not flee like the flimsy-spined courtiers had in order to absolve themselves of responsibility or difficult thought.

Accompanied only by the quiet veil of dusk, she rides the one remaining carriage not gaudily decorated by Lucio before he fell ill, into the city. The carriage stops at a rickety two-storey shop beneath the shadow of the palace, and she knocks on the sturdy front door, adjusting the shawl draped over her head.

The door swings open, but no one is on the other side. Nadia hesitates, until a voice from inside orders, “come in.” The door closes behind her on its own.

Around the corner, a man stands shuffling a deck of large cards with a decorative back. He holds one up. “I’ve been pulling nothing but this card all day until you arrived. The three of staves,” he flips it over to show her the illustration. “Reversed. I suppose that’s you, then.”

Nadia gets right to the point: “Are you the magician Eleutherius?”

“I am. Why is the Countess looking for me?”

Nadia inspects him curiously. Maybe she was expecting Eleutherius to look more like an old wizard, weathered by decades of intense travel and grappling with the arcane. But he is a muscular man of average height, with dark teal hair and a short beard, wearing simple and clean clothing.

“This plague has been tormenting Vesuvia for several weeks. Many people have offered their skills in helping us find a cure; I’m surprised you haven’t been among them. Regardless, I’ve come to take you to the palace so that you can lend your support.”

“No."

Nadia squints at the magician. “Please.”

“Oh, now that you’ve asked nicely…” Eleutherius rubs at his chin contemplatively. “No. My magic isn’t for people who only believe in it as a last resort.”

“I’ll go,” Eleutherius’s apprentice peeks down from the ceiling loft before he clambers down a rickety ladder. “I’ve always wanted to go to the palace.”

“That’s too bad, Asra,” Eleutherius says. “I need you here more than you need to sightsee.”

“Reading fortunes all day while you leave for weeks at a time doesn’t seem to be helping either of us very much,” Asra retorts. This seems like an age-old argument that Nadia wishes she hadn’t stepped into. He keeps pleading, “Please, Eleutherius, let me have a journey of my own. I promise to learn as much as I can and if I return empty-handed, I won’t ask again.”

Like a child bargaining for an extra sweet before dinner’s even been had. Nadia appreciates the sentiment, but wonders how worthwhile taking on the magician’s apparently inexperienced apprentice will be. She’s desperate enough to see where it’ll take her.

“I won’t disappoint you,” Asra tries once more, his determination unwavering.

Eleutherius regards him for a long moment before sighing and gently stroking the back of Asra’s head with an open palm. “You never disappoint me. But you have to be back in a month.”

“Thank you! Thank you, thank you!” The apprentice bounces across the shop and back room as he packs a leather bag with his things. Eleutherius glares at Nadia as if to say, _look at what you made me do._ But she doesn’t make anyone do anything. At the door, Asra excitedly dons a deep purple scarf and a floppy feathered hat. He slings his bag across his chest and grins expectantly at Nadia.

She rolls her eyes playfully at his get-up. “Another fashionista for the palace. Let’s be off, then.”

Eleutherius slams the door behind them.

At the palace, Nadia tours Asra through only the most important locations. For brevity’s sake, as her head is beginning to pound, and so that he might quickly get to work.

“There are ghosts of many Countesses in the halls,” Asra says, matter-of-factly. He follows her with his hands outstretched, running his fingers along the walls and finery. “Can’t you feel them?”

Nadia skews an eyebrow up at him. “That’s silly.”

But she can. Now that he’s said it, put it into words, that is what she’s felt all this time: that nothing is truly hers. She is obnoxiously aware of her reputation — it’s only exacerbated by the fact that the palace is still run by old keepers. Sometimes the milk goes into her cup first so that the pouring tea haphazardly stirs it instead of her favourite opal encrusted spoon. Sometimes the sheet corners are folded in so tightly that she can hardly turn onto her side, for bodies and presences smaller than hers.

“You should train yourself to be more in tune with the world around you. Eleutherius and I can teach you. Or,” Asra adds with a twinkle in his eye. “Just me.”

“Yes,” Nadia replies absently. “Perhaps some day.”

The truth is that she would prefer to know less of the world than she already does. That way she may get a full night’s sleep instead of a head throbbing into her pillow.

“Tell me about Lucio, Countess.”

“Why would I do that? Have you no ears? Everything said about him is true.”

“Magic is a highly emotional phenomenon. Empathy, appreciation, desire, they all flow through us and into the application of magic. To recount these things is to actualize them, and to allowthe universe to work upon those we love.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Asra, but I’ve enlisted your help for a more practical matter. What use do I have for someone to love?”

He shrugs. “Maybe people aren’t tools with uses as much as they are experiences. Emotions.”

What kind of experiences and emotions does Doctor Devorak give Nadia… and why was he the first person she thought of?

“What do you not get from Count Lucio that led you to abandon him?” Asra asks, knowingly. Or perhaps that is a reflection of her guilt.

“Abandon…” Nadia frowns. “It’s not the right word. There was never anything to abandon. I suppose I… I found my desire to be acknowledged as a capable, fully-formed person in him. I liked that he didn’t care very much either way. I liked making my own choices in Vesuvia. But I didn’t realize until too late that it doesn’t matter if I can do what I want if I have nothing and no one to be accountable for.”

“It’s not a partnership,” Asra muses.

“Like an inattentive god, he is pleased to drop all his things onto the earth and see what they do. It doesn’t make me any less of a possession.”

“Do you think it exists, then, the ability to not have to give yourself over to anyone but still be part of them?”

Nadia grimaces and doesn’t answer. That’s the ultimate level of trust, isn’t it? To give one’s life over to another person, knowing it that part of you may be forever ruined, but risking it for fleeting happiness and the expectation that you will receive the same? She recoils at the thought, but wonders if she truly doesn’t want it or has fooled herself into believing as much.

“Do you always interrogate people on sensitive subjects as soon as you meet them?”

Asra laughs. “I suppose I do.”

* * *

Nadia has been avoiding Lucio’s entire side of the palace since the last incident. The servant girl was put on bedrest and recovered by now, but she was reassigned to work in the library. Nadia avoids the library too, so as not to see the girl’s face and have it come up all blue and splotchy in her memory any more than it already does.

But it’s rather unbecoming of a grown woman to wander around the perimeter of her husband’s domain as though stepping over the atrium would strike her down instantly. He is a near-corpse laying in his bed. He can do nothing but yell and stomp his feet on the mattress like a petulant boy.

Yet that’s where she finds herself. She tries to strain her ears to hear what the Count is gargling about today, but the doors are closed and there are no windows along the interior wall. After several minutes, a few servants and doctors scuttle out, wearing thick leather gloves and bird-shaped masks stuffed full of fragrant herbs. While the door is still open, Lucio banishes his pack of attendees by throwing a gold carafe at them. It dents the floor where it initially strikes and bounces to Nadia’s feet, but she doesn’t dare pick it up.

Ilya is the last one to duck out of the bedroom, likely having borne the withering brunt of verbal attack. He shuts the door and locks it from the outside. Nadia does not recall having ever told Portia to share her keyring with him.

“He wants to paint the rooms black now,” Ilya gives Nadia a resigned, thin smile when he sees her waiting in the hall.

She clicks her tongue. “He’ll get his wish only if he finally gets something into that fireplace and the whole damned wing chars.”

“It’s a kind of delirium that comes with the plague.”

“Tell his attendants that he’s gone mad. They’ll not treat a thing he says seriously.”

“That may not the best idea —”

“I know.” Nadia runs a palm over her forehead, tucking a piece of escaped hair back. “It would eliminate some threat, at least, if they see through his charade. A deranged man who left his brain in his helmet. Well… we’ll know whose fault it is if he’s dictating which wall to start with tomorrow morning.”

Ilya dips his head to snicker,his shoulders shaking. It makes Nadia smile too, but hesitantly. Any tension between them is slowly dissipating.

Something clatters on the other side of the wall, succeeded by a litany of curses, but the energy behind them is lost when there’s no one to direct it to.

“Come on,” Ilya nudges the back of his hand into hers. He intends to lead her away, but she follows him only with her eyes.

“Sometimes,” Nadia whispers conspiratorially, “Do you feel as though you should say you’ve done all you can, and wipe your hands clean of it?”

Ilya stops, caught skittishly between her, the hall, and a safer place no doubt far away from here. “What are you trying to say?”

“I think you understand —“

“My hands could never be clean if I did something like that.”

“Is his a life worth preserving?” Nadia snaps.

Ilya’s mouth twists. “I believe some things are unforgivable, but the most unforgivable thing of them all is to do nothing in the face of adversity.”

“And what do you expect to happen? You will find a cure, and he will spring out of bed a changed man, kissing every newborn’s pink cheek? There is medicine for bodies, Ilya, but not for souls.”

His fists are clenched at his sides, looking down at her with murky, dark eyes and she feels vindicated — he was getting too comfortable. He thought that she was good, despite what she’s already shown him, but now he’ll know that there is nothing but misery surrounding her.

“Then it’s my job to find out how to cure souls, too.”

* * *

“I love it here,” Asra declares as he plucks a blue raspberry off a fruit tray on Nadia’s desk. “Eleutherius eats nothing but beets and turnips. It’s quite off-putting, really.”

“I’m happy to know you can stay so chipper,” Nadia says dryly as she swirls her signet ring above an open candle flame and presses it into a pool of wax.

“Doctor Devorak is rather dour these days. His severe attitude worsens the more experiments we fail.” Asra moves on to pulling apart an apricot. “I wish the plague would respond to anything. Nothing we’ve done has lessened even one symptom. But it feels like it saps all the magic out of me.”

“Is that normal?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Hm.” Nadia peels the sealed letter away from her ring and stashes both in a desk drawer. “I haven’t heard from Quaestor Valdemar in some time.”

“Stowed down in the laboratory. Ilya and I have been leading the work in the library without the Quaestor’s guidance.”

“And you’re here, instead of helping him.”

“As I said, Countess,” Asra takes a parting pear as he slips off the corner of her desk. “Very severe. Very dour. He’s free to break for lunch, just as I am, but he hasn’t left the library in three days.”

The reason Doctor Devorak hasn’t had to leave the library in three days is because he’s found it a rather suitable place to sleep between work. Nadia stares down at him unimpressively, one side of his face plastered to a sheet of paper with ink that is still wet, and a half-eaten stuffed roti atop a tower of books.

“Ilya,” Nadia rouses him sternly. His head darts up and she can see the deep gouges of blue under his eyes. “Get up.”

“No, I have to do…” He wipes the sleep from his eyes with both hands blearily.

“If you’re the leader of our efforts against the plague, then your responsibility is not only to cure it but to be well enough to do so. Now get up and come with me.”

Nadia leads him through the groves outside the library, onto the shore of a quaint pond in the middle of the lavender shrubs. The day is sweltering, but the tree leaves obscure much of the direct sunlight and a breeze skims off the water, carrying the chirping of crickets alongside its relief. Ilya kicks idly at a stone wedged in the tall grass.

Ilya looks up at her from under a bundle of his fiery curls. “May I speak honestly?”

“If you’re not being honest I would prefer you to not speak at all, Doctor.”

“You don’t seem to care very much for Count Lucio.”

Nadia crosses her arms. She wasn’t expecting that. “Does he seem like he cares for me?”

“In his own way. I don’t mean to say— you can care for whoever you want, irrespective of how they treat you.”

“Unfortunately, Doctor Devorak, I have obligations to people that dictate how I behave.”

“You don’t have any obligations to me.”

A persisting silence. Long congested shafts of light peek through the clouds and pierce the apple orchards. Nadia’s gaze flickers between his soft smile and the sadness in his eyes, wondering how the two can exist at the same time. And why they’re being given to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “For raising my voice at you after I saw Lucio, and again outside his room. It was vile of me to suggest… that. Speaking on it now, in retrospect,” Nadia swallows against the tightness in her throat. Her gaze wanders off to the side, above Ilya’s shoulder. “My complaints always come across as petty, and I emerge as the antagonist. But in the moment, the pain is fresh and the tongue reactive. I regret the harsh things I say, because it proves the prejudice against me, that I am dictatorial and cruel. It takes away another layer of dirt from the grave I’ve been digging myself.”

When Ilya doesn’t say anything immediately, Nadia shakes her head.

“How characteristic of me,” she says quickly. “I perpetuate the same insensitivity by making you listen to my overdramatic soliloquies. It’s no wonder my sisters loathe me with how often I must have whined at them, their pathetic little sister.”

“No, oh, no,” Ilya lurches forward. “I think when you have nothing but each other, you tend to forget anything the other person could do to slight you. Whatever you consider to be petty complaints, they fall away and matter less in the grand scheme of things.” Then Ilya shakes his head, the tips of his ears turning red, and he covers his face with one hand. “I’m sorry, My Lady. I didn’t mean to speak over your feelings, I don’t even know why I’m sharing this, I should never take wine with my lunch and on an empty stomach too—”

Nadia takes a step closer to him. “Keep going.”

“Ah,” he drags his palm down the side of his face. “All I meant was… our memories are the best in storing the more unsavoury parts of ourselves. But in that arises a particular kind of beautiful truth — that we’re all thinking about ourselves more than we are others. I have a sister as well, and what haunts me at night isn’t her moments of unkindness, but how I responded to it in turn. The tears I’ve caused her are more traumatic to recall than any of my own.”

“I find it difficult to believe that you have any bad at all in you, Ilya.”

He chuckles scornfully. “It’s commonly held that as we age, we grow as people too. Except I have a persistent feeling that I do nothing but regress. I continue to make mistakes and yet not learn from them. I would give everything to relive my youth and innocence again forever.”

“We can switch places,” Nadia says. “It pains me to not be able to recall much of my childhood besides the parts that evoked the worst emotions. It’s a shame that these are the ones that echo through time and drown out the good; good memories and events I know were there, but cannot come to the surface to breathe.”

Ilya’s face morphs through several intangible emotions. After some time of this struggle against himself, all he can say is, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who owed you an apology.”

“You gave it, and I accept it. There’s no harm done.”

“If only that was the case. Harm perpetuates harm.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t cause any harm. How could you, when you dedicate yourself to finding a cure that will alleviate everyone’s suffering?”

“That’s… different."

Nadia feels a warm flush bloom in her chest when he smiles brightly at her. “We’ll do it together, Nadia. I know it’ll come to an end.”

* * *

A servant bursts into Nadia’s office in a panic, panting like he’s trying to take in all the air in the room and barely hanging onto the doorknob. “My Lady, please, hurry, to the Count’s room!”

“Is he dead?” How callous, for that to be her first thought. The servant could just as likely be pronouncing his miraculous recovery, and now she will be on record as having jumped from her chair to see her husband deceased. But she does leave her pen and ink uncapped on the desk and chases after the speedy servant.

“No, something else!”

Asra and Doctor Devorak have also been gathered at the wing, and they peer through the open door together. Eleutherius is at Lucio’s bedside, without any apparent answer as to how he entered in the first place. All things considered, that may be the lowest priority point to address.

“The plague rages on,” he comments coolly, folding his hands behind his back.

Nadia speaks to him across the threshold, “What are you doing here? You refused to help. Did you have a change of heart?”

“I’m being inconvenienced by the plague and your incompetence in clearing it up. I thought you would be done by now. Consider my intervention a favour to myself that also benefits you. But now that I’m here, I can see why you were struggling.”

“Do enlighten us.”

“The plague is a curse,” Eleutherius says, “And one so depraved that it cannot be dispelled by any other means than equally powerful magic.”

Nadia puts a hand on her hip and nods contemptuously at the magician. “How good of you to come along, then. Go on, prove it,” she challenges.

“Come closer,” Eleutherius gestures. “I will.” Nadia cautiously stands at the foot of the bed, with Ilya and Asra on either side. “The Count’s birthday is soon, isn’t it?”

“He’ll be dead before it,” Ilya mutters. Indeed, Lucio has barely moved in the last several hours. Every vein is prominent through his translucent skin and a furious shade of red. “If he even makes it through the night.”

“Doctor Devorak.” Eleutherius turns to him, brandishing a dagger with a lightning bolt shaped blade cast in a sinister black metal. Nadia holds her breath. There is a strange aura melting off him, hot and electric. “As Count Lucio’s physician, do you believe you have exhausted your medical expertise and resources in the attempt to cure him?”

Ilya furrows his eyebrows. “Yes, I do believe that.”

“Do you feel obligated to save the life of your patient?”

“Yes.”

“Would you give everything to save Count Lucio’s life?”

Ilya hesitates.

Eleutherius presses him harder, “Would you?”

“Yes. Yes, I want to save him.”

Eleutherius turns to Lucio, barely lucid and rasping in his death bed, and plunges the dagger into his chest.

Ilya jumps towards Eleutherius to pull the blade out, but Nadia finds she cannot move at all, and the very pit of her stomach is quivering. The blood that immediately soaks Lucio’s pale skin and white blouse is indistinguishable from the rest of the room, which makes it easier to pretend it’s not there.

“What are you doing?!” Ilya struggles with Eleutherius, who does not seem to fight back much except to keep a tight grip on the dagger. “Help me, Asra, for God’s sake, he’s killed the Count!” Asra stands on the other side of the bed, his head hung in either mourning or shame. Both, maybe.

When Eleutherius next plunges the dagger into Ilya’s throat, the palace floor drops out from beneath Nadia’s feet and her soul feels like it’s been ripped out of her and is now hovering above her, observing rather than experiencing. She is a coward, at the end of the day. This deranged magician will kill them all, and she can do nothing but watch and let it happen.

A bright white light bursts from the edges of Ilya’s wound, escaping past the blade still lodged in his neck, turning into a torrent of blue and purple as it spreads into the rest of the room. When the pulsating light bathes everything, it is suddenly sucked back up into its blinding point of origin and Ilya is on the ground, no longer pierced by Eleutherius’s blade.

Eleutherius takes a rag from his waist belt and wipes down the dagger. “You were right to believe it was an illness carried in blood, Doctor Devorak. Life travels with blood. But life is also not something that comes for free.” Eleutherius stares down at Ilya with a cold, hard gaze. He discards the bloody rag onto the floor. “I hope the Count’s was one that was worth the sacrifice.”

On the bed, Lucio takes in a startled breath. Ilya writhes on the floor clutching his woundless throat Nadia doesn’t know how she came to his side, but she is on her knees, collecting him into her arms while he covers his face with both hands and trembles with silent sobs.

_It wasn’t worth it,_ Nadia thinks. Nothing is worth this.

* * *

Nadia was right all along: it doesn’t take very much for a man to revert into a beast when given the opportunity. The beast Lucio is not a beast because he abandons his fork at the dinner table and shoves fistfuls of ox tartare into his mouth. The beast in Lucio came out when the plague entered him. When he was no longer obliged to act with any sense of decency or compassion towards the people who toiled in their service to him under the guise of being ill and possessed by a curse. That was his true nature.

She can hardly look at him anymore except to marvel the fervour with which he guzzles his goblet and licks raw meat from under his nails. Five days recovered and deeply concerned about his appearance for his birthday masquerade that night. Party planning and advertising the bounty placed on Eleutherius and Asra (both of whom had simply vanished) are the only two things that occupy Lucio’s mind.

The rest of the day, like those before it, pass as a haze for Nadia. She goes places and does things, but after an hour or two she doesn’t know how or why she’s done something. She blinks and opens her eyes to a new scene every time. After this party, she pledges to herself, she will be present again. She has to collect the reins and not allow her life to just happen to her anymore. There is nothing of the situation to be salvaged except her own dignity and well-being, which is in the purview of her and her alone, as it always has been.

She dresses for the masquerade in a black gown — mourning, in her mind — and puts on two masks. One for the party, and the other for everyone who sees her. Before she can exit the privacy of the palace, Lucio apprehends her behind a marble pillar.

“For all they know,” Lucio hisses into the ear he tucks a piece of her hair behind. “I was never sick. The plague subsided on its own just in time for us to celebrate.”

“Of course,” she replies cooly, focused on a spot far away to the right. The delusion continues. How will the courtiers not notice his blood red eyes? Fear and practiced inattention have conditioned them, of course. No one would dare.

His breath fanning her cheek, “ _good_.”

She subtly wipes her lace cuffed sleeve across her face. The lively music swells as Lucio joins the courtiers who just arrived that day from their hideaways, flocking earnestly this time to interrogate him on how he dispelled the plague. When the polite smiles she uses to redeem the courtiers of their iniquities against this city threaten to paralyze her face, Nadia takes a glass of rich, dark brandy to a quiet balcony at the back of the palace.

Doctor Devorak is already there, leaning on the stone balustrade. He wears a finely pressed suit set but his face is gaunt and his hair is wild. She hasn’t seen him since Eleutherius’s… ritual. Whatever it was, it was hardly a cure.

“May I join you?”

He nods and she places her drink down.

Despite herself, Nadia asks him, “does it still hurt?”

Ilya’s face goes ashen when he understands what she means. He pulls away the high ruffled collar of his poet shirt, revealing his throat marked with a circular glyph in faint white ink. “It doesn’t hurt. But it feels…” he slumps his shoulders, “mystifying and mystical. Something entwined with my body and soul that I didn’t ask for.”

“As if we ask for anything we receive in life,” Nadia mutters and unthinkingly reaches up to trace the intricate magical lines with the tips of her fingers. She can feel his heavy pulse.

He jerks away, and so does she.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s not you.”

“Clearly it is.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t let you do that. It’s… it’s inappropriate.” Ilya spits out the words as if they are thousands of pinpricks on his tongue, “It’s inappropriate to think and feel of you as I might."

Nadia feels stuck, again. But she won’t be a coward this time. ”Is it so much more inappropriate to act on it, then?"

"So much more," his voice is tight and lamenting.

Nadia won't have it. She demands, "why?"

"Why, why what?"

"Why is it inappropriate?"

Ilya sputters, gesturing vaguely and frantically between them. "A married woman who far outclasses me — oh, oh, a married, higher class woman who is the wife of my patient!”

“You truly feel like you owe even a modicum of respect to the Count?” Nadia grabs him by the lapels of his suit jacket, the raised gold thread embellishments rough under her fingers. “To take a better man’s wife, I could understand, but the spoils of war exchange hands as frequently as greed and lust find home in the heart.”

Nadia’s stomach churns when she parses Ilya’s expression. Unidentifiable, for the most part. But all she can concentrate on is a poorly hidden vein of revolt running through the centre.

She has perfected the art of the self-saboteur, but not the consequences of it. Her ego is still easily stung.

“Forget it,” she starts, but he quickly grasps her by her forearms. It is a sincere, imploring touch.

“I don’t lust after you,” Ilya says softly.

One last faint attempt to peel away from him. “Then _what?”_

What else is there?

“I daresay I’m fond of you.” Ilya’s palms are warm, clammy, trembling through Nadia’s sheer sleeves. His eyes are remorseful, but not dishonest. “For all that fondness is worth, coming from someone like me, there’s a great deal of it.”

“I don’t know what to do with fondness.”

“Would you let me kiss you?” Ilya asks.

She doesn’t know what it would feel like, if it was done with meaning. She is afraid to know.

“Please,” he whispers, with the tenderness usually reserved for prayer.

Nadia kisses him, and the palace erupts into plumes of thick smoke behind them.


End file.
